I'd like to indroduce you to one of the dumbest investors I ever heard of. This fellow started investing about 13-14 years before the crash. As most did, he had some good initial success with some of the high flyers but then the reckoning came and he lost it all. Guess what he's now done? This idiot went and sold all of his personal assets so he could get back in the market... Not only that, his poor wife is now back to work as a dance teacher. She'd been able to retire when he was riding high. It's like watching a poor gambling addict but you can't talk him out of it.

good thing too....

the crash I'm talking about was the crash of 1929 and the investor was Ben Graham. I doubt W Tilson would have had anything but scorn for Mr Graham looking back from the year 1932... that would be sort of analgous to looking back on the idiots of 2001 from 2004.

Can you imagine what would have happened to the investing world at large had the FATHER OF VALUE INVESTING taken the hint and turned his money over to a "smart manager" who weathered the crash better than he did.

The greatest investor I ever met was my grandfather. He went bankrupt in the great depression, he too learned from his mistakes, he amassed what was for him a wonderful nest egg by the time he retired.

In the book of Ecclesiaties it is said that all wisdom comes from pain and suffering. Can you imagine how foolish Mr Graham though he was in the year 1930. Can you imagine the lamantation he could have written in that year.

Instead he learned... through some pain and suffering... and then proceeded to literally invent value investing.

When we look back through the pleated fabric of time, events are so compressed it appears that Mr Graham was broke and then he was rich, simple as that. As we walk through our daily lives the pleats are laid flat as it seems we struggle without progress... nothing but perspective. There are people who read this message who will qualify for "superinvestor" status and no one will know about them but their grateful families. They will remain individual investors who took the time to enjoyably learn one of life's skills. They will not be great when they start... they will only be superinvestors when they finish.... just like Mr Graham.

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